If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

We sit on hard benches under the
fluorescent lighting of a gym in North Portland’s Peninsula Park
Community Center, clad in violet jerseys bearing a mascot that seems to
be half-unicorn, half-mermaid—a mermicorn, if you will. I clutch a
purple-and-silver pompom. A giant label emblazoned “JACOBSON” is affixed
to my chest. Earlier, I’d been summoned (“Johnson! Manson! Jacobson!”)
to play a round of foosball before the audience. At this moment, the
four-member ensemble—our quartet of coaches—pontificates about Wayne
Gretzky. “Are they fucking with us?” my friend whispers. I’m unsure how
to answer.

Pep Talk
is the latest original work from Hand2Mouth, a plucky and innovative
troupe that consistently challenges audience expectations and theater
conventions. Here, it digs into the motivational culture of sports, and
to the extent that the show takes place in a wood-paneled gymnasium and
the performers wear candy-colored athletic garb, it’s transportive. But Pep Talk
walks a fine and wobbly line: At times, the likable ensemble succeeds
in genuinely hyping up the audience or winning our sympathies with
stories of fears overcome. And then there are occasions when, as my
friend said, they just seem to be fucking with us (if you don’t like
shouting in unison, this isn’t the show for you).

At its best, Pep Talk
harnesses its performers’ gifts for humor. On Jan. 26, as Julie Hammond
spoke solemnly about heroes, Maesie Speer sat at a keyboard, her words
beamed onto a double monitor. When The Hunger Games’
arrow-wielding Katniss Everdeen came up, Speer, in a beautiful moment of
improvisation, simply typed “you=mockingjay.” Hammond, meanwhile,
bounded about the court. “I am up here in shorts in January!” she
whooped. “I am clearly trying to give you something!”

But
what is that something? Instances of audience participation can spur
more discomfort than amusement, and the show grows gratuitously
self-referential toward the end. Technically, the kitchen-sink
approach—multiple microphones, several screens, lights that occasionally
cast looming shadows on the gym walls—splits our attention in too many
directions. And, most crucially, the tension between the performers’
natural sincerity and the assaultive, blowhard nature of inspirational
speeches is never reconciled, resulting in a consistent sense of unease.

Hand2Mouth
often spends years developing its shows. This one has had seven months.
To its credit, it starts to ask a number of compelling questions: Can
coaches lead us to catharsis? What’s the nature of groupthink? How do we
each move between roles as coach and player? In one bout of audience
participation, Erin Leddy grilled a woman named Jan about failure. “We
fail, but not always,” Jan said. Take note, Hand2Mouth—and keep playing.